You know how it works: you spend hours trying to find a workaround for a problem that you have encountered, just to realize that it doesn’t quite work in, you know, that browser. Finding little techniques and tricks to help you get to results faster can immensely improve your productivity, so you don’t have to waste time on solutions that will never see the light of day.

I love finding those little useful front-end goodies that make our lives easier. Since technologies emerge and evolve permanently, keeping track on what’s going on is often difficult, especially since specifications change and so does the browser support. For a replacement talk at SmashingConf1Oxford2 last week, I’ve decided to collect some of the useful techniques from various articles, conversations and my workshops in a slide deck — and since it proved to be useful for many front-end developers I’ve spoken to after the talk, I’m very privileged to share it with the entire community as well. To the slides.3

So off we go. A few dirty tricks from the dark corners of front-end development4. Beware: the things you’ll find in the deck can not be unseen, and I do no take any responsibility for whatever happens next.

Rob Costello

However, I’ve found that a better solution to the nested links issue (and one that’s standards compliant) is to put an empty link at the start of your item and position it absolutely to cover the whole item. You can apply position: relative to the internal links to make them sit above the covering link.

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